If this is a joke, where's the punchline?

It is rare that fiction becomes real. For instance, please enjoy the following joke and then compare it to the bit of reality it aligns with:

A man standing in line at a check out counter of a grocery store was very surprised when a very attractive woman behind him said, "Hello!" Her face was beaming. He gave her that "who are you look," and couldn't remember ever having seen her before. Then, noticing his look, she figured she had made a mistake and apologized. "Look," she said, "I'm really sorry but when I first saw you, I thought you were the father of one of my children," and walked out of the store.

The guy was dumbfounded and thought to himself, "What the hell is the world coming to? Here is an attractive woman who can't keep track of who fathers her children!"

Then he got a little panicky. "I don't remember her," he thought but, maybe ... during one of the wild parties in college, perhaps he did father her child!

He ran from the store and caught her in the parking lot and asked, "Are you the girl I met at a party in college and we got really drunk and had wild crazy sex on the pool table in front of everyone?"

"No," she said with a horrified look on her face. "I'm your son's second grade teacher."

And now for a dose of reality. While reading a recent edition of the paper, I was skimming the pages to see if the stories might actually be interesting even though the headlines were not. Near the end of one story, a paragraph began with:

"The fathers of a lot of my children are in Iraq," she said. "So it's especially nice to have Mister Rogers."

I just about bust a gut and then I read the paragraph above that quote: " ... and C____ , a first-grade teacher at Fort L_____ , watches [Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood] with her students."